Athletic trainers work with Flagstaff firefighter academy to prevent injuries | Arizona Daily Sun
Athletic trainers have been working with recruits in the Greater Flagstaff Region Fire Academy to prevent injuries as they learn the skills needed to be a firefighter.
Three athletic trainers — Megan Mulready, an assistant clinical professor at Northern Arizona University, and Lauren Donnelly and Sara Chatham-Carey of the Physio Shop — have been holding sessions two mornings a week with the recruits in this year’s academy.
The academy trains firefighters for five area fire departments. Starting in July each year, the recruits spend 40 hours a week for 11 weeks in hands-on practice of skills they’ll need for a career in firefighting.
Those tasks include pulling hose, searching a building, using power tools and technical rescue training such as rappelling and wildland firefighting. The academy also includes three “hot drills,” with real fire inside of a building.
“It’s physically challenging, it’s mentally demanding, it’s showing up every day,” said fire battalion Chief Kyle Denham. “You’re putting a lot of physical work in, which takes a toll on your body and your mind.”
Denham said most of injuries he’s seen in the fire academy are back injuries caused by lifting. The majority of a firefighter’s work is medical, he said, which can involve carrying and lifting patients.
Rolled ankles and sprained wrists are also common, as firefighters work in unfamiliar locations with low visibility.
“When we’re training, you can’t always see, you’re doing a lot of things by feel, and when you’re in there working, you have a hose on the ground, you have other people in there next to you, and that’s just real life,” he said. “That’s a very potential injury if you’re actually in a fire.”
Participation in the new program is encouraged but not required. All 13 of this year’s recruits decided to take part.
Their work with the athletic trainers began with a functional movement screen to assess their current status and any areas of potential risk. The recruits were then grouped based on their scores for the biweekly sessions.
For the Wednesday sessions, the three trainers taught functional movement exercises designed to increase strength, mobility and stability. The exercises built on each other over time as the trainees developed skills and understanding.
Another session focused on rotational exercises, single-leg movements and “core-involved isometricals,” Mulready said.
On Fridays, the sessions take a recovery-based approach, teaching topics such as foam rolling and stretching techniques.
Mulready designed the training program to address a need she saw in occupations employing “tactical athletes,” which refers to those working in service professions that have a significant physical component to their work, such as law enforcement and emergency responders.
“As an athletic trainer, I’m used to working with teams [and] having quick access to the athletes, doing prevention, screening, treatment, rehabilitation, referral,” she said. ” … I was considering to myself, ‘Why isn’t this accessible to the people who provide us emergency care?'”
She added: “I think all first responders, those who provide us emergency care, should have access to care like this. They should be provided educational programs, prevention programs, in-house care referrals, treatment modifications, just like a regular athlete would. … Even though they might not have had athletic backgrounds in the past, they’re still athletes. This is the job that they do.”
She began reaching out to local agencies, and the fire department responded.
“I’ve seen career-ending injuries, I’ve seen some things that I think maybe could have been prevented, so that’s why I was all on board,” Denham said.
The goal is for those participating in the sessions to be able to use the skills learned throughout the careers and potentially share what they’ve learned with other firefighters.
Denham said one of his hopes for the program was to “start getting more of these recruits out there who can build better habits for the bigger picture of the fire service in this region.” Both he and Mulready said their plan was to continue offering it.
See the original article on the Arizona Daily Sun.